Shootings and Harsh Weather Take a Toll

As spring unfolds across Yellowstone National Park, biologists calculate that less than half of the park's bison population survived the winter, the herd's worst since 1902, the year that Congress ordered Yellowstone to rescue bison from extinction.

With ice covering winter forage like concrete, about 850 of the shaggy giants starved or froze to death in the park. And 1,080 lumbered out of the park and were shot by Montana officials worried that the bison could spread disease to cattle.

''Got to kill the buffalo for the holy cow,'' chanted members of the Bison Action Group at a recent protest in Bozeman. ''Got to shoot the buffalo, pow, pow, pow.''

Emotions over the shootings have run high, often trampling the facts as thoroughly as bison stampeding across the plains. Ranchers and the United States Agriculture Department want to make sure that cattle in the states on Yellowstone's border are not contaminated by disease, but American Indians and environmentalists say there are alternatives to shooting the bison. And many rural Westerners criticize the herd and range management of the United States Interior Department.

This tourist village at the park's northern entrance has become the epicenter of the bison battles. One morning in March, as 150 American Indians and their white allies gathered in ''a circle of life'' to pray for the bison, gunfire a mile away could be heard as Montana officials shot 14 bison approaching grazing cattle.

Two weeks later, on March 23, a woman burst into a public meeting in Gardiner and splashed rotting bison entrails on a panel of public officials who were discussing the bison dispute, including Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, the state's two United States Senators, Conrad Burns and Max Baucus, and the Governor, Marc Racicot.

Park rangers have placed black mourning tape over the bison image on their gold badges. Some environmentalists have called for a summer tourism boycott.

By contrast, Senator Burns, a Republican, drew wild applause at a recent meeting of the Montana Farm Forum when he referred to Michael Finley, the park superintendent, as ''this jughead we've got running Yellowstone Park.''

Senator Burns represents a state where agriculture is the No. 1 industry and cattle outnumber people three to one. (Montana's human population is about 870,000.)

Mr. Finley works for the Interior Department, which features the bison in its seal. Every year, Yellowstone is visited by about three million people, many of them attracted by the chance to see bison grazing by roadways. The park has received thousands of letters and telephone calls in recent months from people concerned about the fate of the bison.

Two factors have brought about the current situation: overpopulation of bison in the park and the park's status as the last major reservoir in the United States of brucellosis, a disease that crops up in humans as undulant fever. While some environmentalists portray Yellowstone's herd as the last wild bison herd in the United States, it is in reality the nation's only unmanaged herd. Hunting keeps in check the nation's two other wild -- or unfenced -- bison herds, one in Alaska and one in Utah.

To save bison from extinction, Yellowstone officials brought bison bulls here from Texas, plowed up native grasses and planted hay, and, for half a century, ran a ''buffalo ranch,'' complete with corrals and salt licks. As the bison population grew, rangers distributed the animals around the park by truck, castrated bulls, sold excess animals and sent some animals to a National Park Service slaughterhouse.

In 1967, culling was stopped on the theory that ''natural regulation'' -- starvation and disease -- would keep the herd in check. Yellowstone's bison herd then increased tenfold in 30 years, hitting about 3,500 last fall.

Bison are so fecund that the national herd increases by 25 to 30 percent a year, according to the National Bison Association, a trade group. With about 250,000 bison in the United States today -- most on buffalo ranches -- Yellowstone's herd of about 1,500 accounts for less than 1 percent of the total. Many range professionals argue that the park cannot support more than 1,000 bison.

''If we ran our ranch and overgrazed it the way Yellowstone is run, we would have picketers at our mailbox,'' said Wally McRae, a cattle rancher who is a spokesman for a Montana environmental group, the Northern Plains Resources Council.

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Indeed, other Western parks with bison herds routinely reduce their numbers through hunting or auctions in the fall. Last year, Custer State Park, in South Dakota, covered one-third of its annual operating expenses by holding a bison auction that netted $665,000. If free of brucellosis, the roughly 2,000 bison that have died around Yellowstone since January could have fetched at least $2 million at auctions.

Yellowstone officials say their park is too important a part of the Rocky Mountain ecosystem to be run like a ranch. They add that Yellowstone, almost half the size of Massachusetts and 31 times the size of Custer State Park, is far too large to fence. But by clinging to ''natural regulation'' as the best form of bison control, Yellowstone officials ignore history. For centuries, bison control was carried out by American Indian hunters.

''Indians were the major and most effective predator of bison in North America,'' said Alston Chase, a Montana naturalist and author of ''Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park'' (1986).

Michael Fox, a Gros Ventre Indian and the newly elected president of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, agrees. His group represents 30 American Indian tribes with buffalo herds. ''They are trying to make the park a natural system,'' Mr. Fox said from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana. ''Well, in the 1960's, they removed the presence of man. That had been the natural regulator for thousands of years. That's when everything got out of whack.''

Shoshone Indians, the Wyoming descendants of the tribe that hunted in Yellowstone in the 1800's, have proposed renewing traditional bison hunts to control the park population. Park officials have declined, citing rules that limit hunting to problem grizzly bears.

Although 41 bison were accidentally killed by Montana motorists this winter, the annual spillover of Yellowstone bison seeking winter range would probably have been ignored if about 10 percent of the herd did not carry brucellosis. In animals, the disease causes spontaneous abortions. Some scientists believe that cattle could acquire the disease by licking or sniffing the afterbirth of such an abortion from an infected bison cow.

Humans, in turn, can acquire undulant fever by drinking milk. Generally a lifelong affliction, undulant fever causes stiffness of joints, similar to a recurring flu.

Brucellosis, which once cost American stock growers about $300 million a year in lost calves and milk, now infects fewer than 30 cattle herds, costing ranchers about $1 million a year in losses. Today, the Agriculture Department certifies 36 states as free of brucellosis, including the three states of Yellowstone Park: Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

With brucellosis infecting Yellowstone's elk, moose and grizzly bears as well as its bison, the department has threatened to withdraw certification from the three states. In recent weeks, Alabama, Colorado, Oregon and Texas have threatened to demand blood tests and quarantines for cattle from the Yellowstone border states.

Among Montana ranchers, the fear is real.

''The buffalo just blast through the fences,'' said Wade Peck, who runs about 500 head of cattle on Royal Teton Ranch, only four miles north of the park. ''Who is going to want to buy bulls who have been exposed to brucellosis?''

Although dairy cows at Yellowstone's ''buffalo ranch'' probably first infected park bison with brucellosis around 1915, park officials say they do not know whether bison can transmit brucellosis back to cows. Believing that there is no short-term solution to the problem, the Interior Department has chosen to finance research on a vaccine and to pay for the continuation of an environmental impact study.

. Mr. Fox, of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, proposes building a $2 million quarantine center on land at Fort Belknap to hold all bison that test negative for brucellosis after they are captured outside Yellowstone. To avoid any possible contamination of tribal cattle, 1,280 acres would be encircled by two 8-foot high game-proof fences and a third fence of barbed wire.

''All the government agencies involved are going to spend a ridiculous amount of money anyhow, doing nothing,'' Mr. Fox said. ''We are hoping to get in on the Montana construction season -- instead of waiting until everybody starts screaming again next winter.''